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Why did I buy these cards?

In the picture above, you can see the new baseball cards that I’ve purchased since the start of the 2015 collecting season. These boxes contain complete sets of the following:

2015 Topps Series 1

2015 Topps Series 2

2015 Topps Heritage Master Set

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Set

2015 Topps Update Series

These boxes were all purchased from a case breaker who has always been more than fair to me. If I want new baseball cards in the year they are released, this seems to me the best way to do it. I can let the breaker have fun with the added value and I can pay for only the cards I know I want. I don’t have to open a pack of cards and wonder if the card I’m looking at is a variation or the card that belongs to the main set. I don’t have to worry about parallels. I can only purchase the insert sets I actually want to keep.

This arrangement has worked for me for a few years now, but there’s a catch. Through 2014, within a week of receiving my sets, I would have them in binders. I would carefully go through each set and examine each card, even reading the backs on Heritage and most base Topps cards. Even if there were numerous things I didn’t like about the sets, I still managed to enjoy them.

I thought that the 2015 Topps set was easily the most interesting base set they’ve put out in a long, long time, and yet, mine sits in the box it was shipped in. I thumbed through Series 1 when I received it, but Series 2, Update, Heritage and A&G are unmolested. This raises the question: why did I buy these cards?

It’s not a question I can answer yet other than to say, I’m not ready to give up on new baseball cards just yet. I don’t want to be sitting here in a few years wondering why I stopped.

One note: not all of my 2015 baseball card sets were purchased already completed from a case breaker. I put together 2015 Topps Stadium Club together through retail purchases, one random lot on eBay and a few trades. This is easily my favorite Topps set since the early Allen & Ginter sets. I’ve never seen better photography in a baseball card set. (It’s far superior to the tightly cropped action photos that dominate the base set.) This set was the most few I’ve had with new baseball cards in year and I figure there’s no way Topps can screw it up in 2016 either. I’ll be back! (Wait – variations and short prints? Crap.)